The big reveal is in one of the very first scenes ... you think ‘where do you go from here?’
The makers of mystery drama, Safe, are back with a new Netflix thriller in The Stranger. Lead actor Richard Armitage tells GEMMA DUNN more
HOW would you react if your whole world was turned on its head in an instant? That’s exactly what happens to Adam Price, a happily married father of two, whose charmed existence is rocked to the core after a shock revelation.
Neftflix’s The Stranger reunites the team behind the hit series Safe, having been adapted by Danny Brocklehurst from the novel by Harlan Coben.
Richard Armitage, 48, takes the lead in the psychological thriller.
What else can The Hobbit actor tell us about the show?
Introduce us to your character and your role within the story...
I PLAY a character called Adam Price who’s a successful lawyer, family man, a dad and a husband.
They are a pretty aspirational family and their existence is happy.
They are heavily scheduled with their lives and I feel like sometimes they pass like ships in the night but it’s a good life, they function well and it’s a very modern family.
The household is balanced, and mum and dad take equal roles, they drive nice cars, have a beautiful house and then The Stranger (played by Hannah John-Kamen) sidles up to Adam at the football club and drops a bombshell on him.
What attracted you to this drama?
EVERYTHING was a surprise, as the journey that this character goes on is full of trap-doors and dead-ends.
He’s completely blind to the situation. Also, the big reveal happens in one of the first scenes of the show and you think, ‘Where do you go from here?’
He receives this damning information and confronts his wife in the first 10 minutes.
That interested me because it’s usually the other way around, you get to the end and he finds out what’s happened.
Were you already familiar with Harlan and Danny’s work?
YES, I watched Safe, which Danny and Harlan wrote together, which I loved. I was aware of Harlan’s work because I’m based in New York and Harlan is such a prolific writer both in the UK and America.
The thing that I really like about Harlan’s work is that it’s always about a man or a woman who feels like you, in an extraordinary and escalating situation. There were elements of Gone Girl in our story and I thought, ‘Oh this is really thrilling, this is an ordinary life that under the surface has become extraordinary’.
How did you prepare yourself for the role?
I PORED over the book to extract as much detail as I could and then started to build a family photo album of their lives.
Because the story happens in the first 10 minutes, I had to build their life before the bombshell hit.
The album was their lives and their achievements, the births of their kids, the holidays they went on.
Alongside this I usually create a soundtrack, so I’ve got a visual and an audible account of their lives. I built the background of the characters through that and I wrote a biography of how
Adam and Corrine (played by Dervla Kirwan) met.
That found its way into a speech at the end of the story, so it was all connected to real events that I’d created and drawn on my own experiences to put in there.
What’s Adam’s reaction to his encounter with The Stranger?
IT WAS probably one of the most challenging scenes I’ve had because of its extraordinarily obscure flavour. If somebody comes up to you that you don’t know and starts to tell you personal things about your life which are absurd, how do you react to it? What he doesn’t know and doesn’t show are the most interesting parts of the scene.
It’s almost like being in a vacuum and he has to hear what she’s saying and believe it, but at the same time keep her at arm’s length. We played with loads of different versions of the scene where he was very angry or completely mystified.
He receives what she’s telling him but it’s not until later on, at home when he starts to confront his wife, that it really sinks in.
What do you hope the audience will take away from the show?
I HOPE they come with Adam on this detective journey because he’s trying to get to the bottom, not of what happened, but what’s happened to her.
Initially you think it’s going to be a big exposé on what his wife has done, the lie that she’s told etc, but it’s not
about that at all. It’s about finding out where she’s gone and why.
I hope that the audience are sitting on the edge of their seats trying to find Corinne as much as Adam is.
Finally, working with Netflix, did you feel a sense of creative freedom?
I DO feel like certain networks have always had their brand identity, and actually it’s a much more open field with Netflix; you never hear that thing of, ‘We can’t really do that because it’s not a Netflix thing’ – anything goes really, which feels much more fertile.
It’s just letting the content speak for it and being prepared to take on something unexpected.
■ The Stranger launches on Netflix on Thursday.